Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (review)

A P R I L 2 0 0 7 145 Overall though, this book is a good addition to the field of ethnic studies in America’s bloodiest war and is of value to both scholars and the general public. DAVID T. GLEESON College of Charleston Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. By Steven Deyle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. x, 398 pp. $29.99 (cloth). ISBN 0-19-516040-1. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-19-531019-5. Although writings on the Atlantic slave trade are voluminous, scholars have been surprisingly slow to examine the inland trade in humans within the United States, especially after the young republic ceased to import Africans in January 1808 and the cotton economy began to draw laborers from the Chesapeake into the fresh lands of the lower South. English historian Michael Tadman published Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, 1989), which for the most part examined professional slave traders and how they operated . Walter Johnson’s very different Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999) delved into the New Orleans slave depots, where most slaves from the upper South were resold into Texas and the Louisiana sugar fields. Given the rather narrow focus of both Tadman and Johnson, it would have been very easy for Deyle to publish a thin monograph on yet a third aspect of the internal traffic. Instead, he ambitiously set out to write a complete account of all aspects of the domestic slave trade. This massive study examines the trade from every conceivable angle, from the emergence of the internal trade in the years immediately after the revolution to its central place in the antebellum economy. The debate over whether North American slavery was an unusual variety of Atlantic capitalism or rather a clumsy, seigniorial mode of labor organization is one that shows no signs of an early resolution; Deyle’s chapter on the connection between the slave trade and the market revolution is especially relevant to it. He demonstrates that some traders, such as future Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest, amassed a fortune in buying and selling humans (as much as $100,000 annually during his peak years), and that other traders T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 146 exhibited a keen understanding of the nation’s money markets. Yet in the end, the fact that most traders revealed modern business acumen hardly proves that the late antebellum South functioned as a capitalist society. Northern businessmen, Deyle observes, transformed their region into an industrial, free labor society, while southern traders, “despite their best efforts at market development, ended up making human property the most valuable form of capital investment in the South” (p. 141). Equally revelatory are Deyle’s last chapters, which examine how northern abolitionists used the traffic to attack slavery as a domestic institution and how slaves themselves—the forgotten abolitionists in far too many studies—resisted the trade. Since abolitionists understood the extent to which unfree labor was protected on the state level, they focused on the area where the federal government held undisputed and unshared legal authority: interstate commerce. New York judge William Jay, son of the nation’s first chief justice, observed that it was the commerce clause that allowed Congress to close the Atlantic trade in 1808, establishing the precedent for halting the traffic in humans between Washington and New Orleans. Without a fresh supply of black labor for the fields of the frontier South, the very existence of slavery in Texas (or the lands seized from Mexico) was threatened. Deyle’s study concludes with two detailed appendices that chart the number of slaves sold within a historiographical context. Scholars are aware of some aspects of Deyle’s account, but never have all the pieces been pulled together in such a way. As a result, Carry Me Back may well become that rarest of all things in the modern publishing world: the definitive study. Writers will no doubt find some obscure aspect of the trade to write about, but it is hard to...